In an optical communications system, a transmitter may encode client data bits by mapping them to multi-bit symbols, and then using a particular modulation scheme to modulate one or more optical carriers with the symbols, thereby generating an optical signal to be transmitted via a communications channel to a receiver, where the optical signal is representative of digital information. The receiver may process an optical signal received via the communications channel to recover estimates of the multi-bit symbols, the client data bits, or both.
The optical signal received at the receiver may comprise a degraded version of the optical signal that was generated at the transmitter. Various components of the optical communications system may contribute to signal degradation, including optical fibers, optical amplifiers, filters, isolators, and the like. Amplifier noise, optical nonlinearity, polarization-dependent loss or gain (PDL), polarization mode dispersion (PMD), frequency-dependent loss, and other effects may introduce noise and/or distortion into the signal. The amplitude of the noise relative to the amplitude of the optical signal may be characterized by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), or alternatively by the noise-to-signal ratio (NSR). The NSR may be convenient when dissecting noise sources. A high NSR may result in noisy symbol estimates, which may in turn produce erroneous estimates of the client data bits. The probability that client data bit estimates recovered at the receiver will differ from the original client data bits encoded at the transmitter may be characterized by the Bit Error Ratio or Bit Error Rate (BER). A given application may have a maximum BER tolerance. For example, an application may require that the BER not exceed 10−16.
Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques may be used to reduce the BER. Instead of the transmitter mapping the original client data bits directly to multi-bit symbols, the client data bits may first undergo FEC encoding based on a chosen FEC scheme. The resulting FEC-encoded bits include redundant information, such as parity or check bits. The bit estimates recovered at the receiver will be estimates of the FEC-encoded bits that were generated the transmitter. These estimates may undergo FEC decoding at the receiver based on the chosen FEC scheme. The FEC decoding makes use of the redundant information that was included in the FEC-encoded bits in order to detect and correct bit errors.
FEC encoding is advantageous in that it may permit error control without the need to resend data packets. However, this is at the cost of increased overhead. The amount of overhead or redundancy added by FEC encoding may be characterized by the information rate R, where R is defined as the ratio of the amount of input information to the amount of data that is output after FEC encoding (which includes the overhead). For example, if FEC encoding adds 25% overhead, then for every four information bits that are to be FEC-encoded, the FEC encoding will add 1 bit of overhead, resulting in 5 FEC-encoded data bits to be transmitted to the receiver. This corresponds to an information rate R=4/5=0.8.